Friday 2 March 2012 04.30 EST
First published on Friday 2 March 2012 04.30 EST

This is what the Tories wrote in their manifesto before the 2010 election: "With a Conservative government any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in parliament. And we will introduce a new public reading stage for bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online."

Given that 165,000 of us signed the petition to drop the NHS bill, why does the coalition still deny MPs the opportunity to debate this in the House of Commons? When the public seek to force the issue on to the floor of the elected chamber, and seek a debate that is rightfully theirs, the government decides to silence them. It is truly shameful.

David Cameron said in 2011: "One of the points of the new e-petitions website is to make sure that if a certain level of signatures is reached, the matter will be debated in the house, whether we like it or not. That is an important way of empowering people." Yet as 52% of voters want the bill dropped, the government has no mandate for these unsafe, destabilising reforms. David Cameron has such little confidence in his own ministers and their discredited bill that he is now protecting them from the scrutiny of the House of Commons.

This bill is about the privatisation of the NHS – profits versus patients. It will disenfranchise the most vulnerable people in our society, such as the elderly and the mentally ill, creating a two-tier system in which only the best-educated and wealthy citizens receive the top-class healthcare that should be available to all. The organisational changes that this bill proposes will cost the taxpayer £3bn. This is an appalling waste of money at a time this country can least afford it, and it is money that should be spent on bolstering frontline services.

Who supports these proposals? The BMA, the royal colleges, nurses, academics, public health professionals and the general public have all expressed concerns that have largely been ignored. The much vaunted "pause" was little more than a PR stunt to give the impression that the government was actually listening to the feedback received during its consultation. Yesterday, the NHS Tower Hamlets clinical commissioning group wrote to the prime minister asking him to withdraw the controversial health and social care bill. Even Tim Montgomerie, the editor of Conservative Home, called the bill a serious threat to the party's long-term election prospects, and alleged that three cabinet ministers had more or less commanded him to say so.

And the chairs of CCGs (clinical commissioning groups), the torchbearers of Lansley's reforms, are lining up to tell David Cameron that the bill is distracting them from working on clinical pathways, and distracting managers who are being forced to form commissioning support organisations, and urging him to drop the health bill.

The reality is that no one supports these proposals except Andrew Lansley and a handful of ministers who have staked their careers on these proposals and do not want to lose face.

It is true the bill in its various guises has been debated in minute detail in the Commons and Lords. But the process has been so tortuous, and the bill has shifted so frequently under the weight of more than a thousand tabled amendments, that it has made things more confused. It is not just the aims of the legislation that remain unclear – so too are the views of the Liberal Democrats.

Nick Clegg has vacillated spectacularly back and forth from cheerleader to critic, so it feels like we won't really know what he thinks until the party's spring conference has its say. Cameron will do whatever it takes to save face, subject to retaining Clegg's support, and the deputy prime minister will be influenced by how much damage he thinks the Lib Dems' support for the bill will do to the party. It is worth remembering that the top-down organisational NHS reforms were not in the Conservatives' election manifesto, let alone in that of the Lib Dems, nor was it in the coalition agreement. It has no electoral mandate.

Two things need to be done. First, keep signing the e-petition to put pressure on Cameron and let him know the public's anger and disapproval. Second, delegates to the Lib Dem conference, and Lib Dem councillors standing in the forthcoming local elections, need to be heavily lobbied. Lib Dem activists, such as David Hall-Matthews, Lord Greaves, a Lib Dem peer, and many others fear the bill will be "political suicide" and as damaging for their party as its spectacular U-turn over university tuition fees. I hope Lib Dem activists will defy Nick Clegg over these dangerous, controversial, destabilising health reforms by seeking to "kill" them at a party policy-making spring conference next week.

The NHS reform bill is fundamentally flawed, complex, incoherent, dangerous, unsafe and not fit for purpose. A joint opposition by the medical royal colleges and the public can still force the coalition to drop the health bill even at this late stage.